


i'm standing on the tracks, you're driving the train

by aletheakatherine



Category: The Girl on the Train (2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-04-28 13:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14450337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletheakatherine/pseuds/aletheakatherine
Summary: In a desperate bid to escape the nightmares of her past, Rachel flees to America to start a new life an ocean away. Everything seems to be going perfectly until she wakes up one night screaming, the other side of the bed cold. In the end she's not sure she knows the difference between nightmare and reality anymore - and her new Prince Charming may be the root of all her problems.





	1. a life like a pendulum

“Christ, Rachel,” he says, shaking his head.

“I just - I just -” She’s shaking. She hates it, how her hands tremble against each other, how clammy she feels, how her mascara’s smudged down across her cheekbones and her hair hangs messily around her face. She knows what she looks like. She knows she’s an absolute shitshow. There’s a reason she’s spent the last twenty-four hours avoiding mirrors at all costs, no matter what - avoiding her reflection, too, in darkened shop windows and shiny walls.

“You need to get off this stuff,” he says. “There’s no excuse.”

She presses her hands together tight, laces her fingers together so her knuckles rub against each other uncomfortably, chafing. “The nightmares,” she says, except it comes out half as a stutter. “The nightmares, I can’t - they keep…” She chokes on her own words, shakes her head. “I can’t get rid of them. I just want them to go away.”

“Rachel, the alcohol isn’t helping.”

“Makes me forget…” Scott Hipwell, she thinks. Scott Hipwell. She’d gotten off the alcohol for him and what was the point? He was as much a bastard as the rest of them. It makes her angry, thinking about it, because she doesn’t even know who to feel sorry for anymore, because Scott’s a bastard and Megan’s an absolute fucking whore and Anna, she can’t even start on Anna, there’s a video of her shouting fuck you, Anna Boyd! at a mirror painted with X’s in red, and Tom - she wants to wring Tom’s throat, wishes she could kill him a million times over - the only reason she doesn’t hate Anna more is because every time she thinks of Anna, there’s that image, the distinct memory of Anna twisting the corkscrew deeper and deeper into Tom’s ugly neck.

He deserved it, she thinks, and it doesn’t matter that she’s drunk, because she’ll think the same thing once she’s sober.

“Rachel -”

“I just want to forget it, you know? Like, all of it. But I can’t. It just - it keeps coming back, over and over, it’s so horrible -” The last word comes out in a gasp, rough, uneven against her lips and her tongue. She takes another shot of the vodka and it burns on the way down, worse than medicine, but she doesn’t care because everything’s getting fuzzy and blurry and it’s worth it. The world’s swaying precariously, around and around, and she feels faintly nauseous. The image of Anna with the corkscrew in Tom’s neck seems to waver in and out of focus in her mind’s eye. “Don’t you ever wonder, don’t you think -”

She stops. She doesn’t remember how she was planning on finishing that sentence.

“Rachel, you’ve got to stop. You’ll drink yourself dead.” He’s an American, fucking American, she thinks that back in London nobody ever told her to stop drinking - except Cathy, but Cathy was different, somehow, and why does everything feel so weird?

“Don’t you ever think,” she starts again, slurring over the words because her tongue feels absolutely huge in her mouth, like an oversized worm that’s going to snake and slither its way between her teeth and her lips and out of her head. “Don’t you ever think that maybe it’d be nice if, if we could all just...ride a train forever, back and forth, and that’s all that mattered, just this one train going back and forth and back and forth like a pendulum, swinging one way and then another, and then -”

“Rachel,” Chris says. His voice is higher now, less confident - pleading.

“...and then you, like, nothing matters. And one day the train stops going back and forth and you’re going one way, and all those pretty little houses, you know, the fucking houses with their fucking perfect backyards and their beautiful little porches, those whitewashed balconies where the sluts kiss the other man, or maybe it’s not another man but another woman, I don’t know, anyway - one day the train stops going back and forth and all of the little rows of houses and neighborhoods are a million miles behind you, all of that - that history, the nightmares, all of the stupid shit you’ve done in the past and -”

“It won’t be behind you unless you stop drinking,” Chris says. His hand is on top of her hands now, and his eyes are shining, almost like he’s about to cry.

“I like drinking,” she says, syllables running together, liquid, making one word from three.

“It’ll break you.”

She smiles, and laughs, and her laugh is dry and ugly and rough, and her mascara’s so fucking smeared she looks like a giant panda.

“I’m already broken,” she says, as her hand knocks the vodka to the floor.

He carries her to the bedroom and her head’s slumped on his shoulder, and she’s hardly breathing, but somehow that doesn’t seem to matter today.


	2. i never auditioned for this role

She wakes to a sun that splinters through the windows like a million long shards, barred by the Venetian blinds.  The bed is soft beneath her, so soft it’s like a marshmallow and she thinks she’s going to sink and sink and sink into it forever, and her fingers curl into the sheets convulsively, clutching, as though somehow holding onto them might keep her from slipping away again.  She’s tired. She knows she’s tired. She doesn’t know how to shake it off, how to open her eyes without letting them close themselves all over again.

“Rach?”

She blinks blearily, once, twice, three times.  “Mmmf,” she murmurs against the pillow, mashing her face into it so it feels like it’s half-suffocating her, trapping oxygen in her lungs.  “Just one more snooze.”

Her head hurts.  It’s funny how she hadn’t noticed it before, but her head hurts and everything is fuzzy - fuzzy and sharp all at once, like a paradox, a contradiction, an impossibility.  She flexes her fingers experimentally and they feel funny - stiff. Her own voices sounds strange in her ears, breaks off and echoes and repeats itself like a broken record gone wrong.  She tries to focus on the Venetian blinds, on their straight even bars and how they cross the window, one side of the frame to the other, but her eyes keep drifting away and closed and she just wants to sleep, please let me sleep, just a little longer, until the pain goes away.

She shakes her head to clear it, and there’s a shadow at the blinds.  A woman. Tall, lips that curl into an expression that’s not a smile but almost is, the kind of almost-smile that sends shivers down your spine and makes you wonder if she’s secretly plotting how she’ll kill you in your sleep.  Blue eyes. Blonde hair. A baby in her arms, wrapped in a little mountain of cloth, sleeping serenely or giggling when the blonde woman pokes her tummy.

She shakes her head again, and the image vanishes.

“Rach -”

“Just one more…”  The words come out like a moan, distorted, and she buries her face in the pillow, and her head hurts.

“It doesn’t make you forget,” Chris says, peering into the room from the whitewashed doorway.  Everything is whitewashed here, bland. It’s one of the things Rachel hates most about America, even though she knows she came here to run from the excitement, to run from everything about her past.  “See? The alcohol doesn’t make you forget. You’re remembering it right now, still, Rachel, I can see it in your eyes.”

She burrows deeper into the blankets, into the sheets.  Maybe,  _ maybe _  - if she hides herself well enough, maybe he will never know.

“Rach...please don’t do that.  Come on, you’ve got to eat breakfast.”

“I don’t want breakfast.”  The pillow cuts her off from the real world, douses it in darkness, provides a strange kind of escape, and escape from the train she rides day in and day out, the pendulum that swings from one point to another and back again.  She breathes in the scent of it, of laundry detergent and cleanness, and reaches with one hand for the bottle of vodka she knows she left on her dresser last night.

Her fingers touch nothing.

“Rach -”

She’s up now, up like a shot, every part of her tense, kneeling on the bed in the dip her body’s carved into the mattress overnight.  “You took it,” she whispers, and her voice is accusing. “You fucking took it. Where is it?”

“Rach, come on now -”

“I didn’t come here for you to control me the way Tom did, you know?  I just...I need a drink, once in a while. I’m not an alcoholic anymore, Chris.  I just need it once in a while.” She looks away, feels the tears burn at her eyes.  “Please let me drink. At least then I won’t feel so cold.”

“Put on a jacket.”

“Just give me a drink -”

“If you drink, it’ll only warm you up for a bit.”  He shakes his head slowly. “I’m not here to fight with you, Rachel, I’m here to talk, and I need you sober, because this is important, alright?  I didn’t take away your bottle for nothing. You know I hate depriving babies of their milk.”

She raises her eyebrows at him.  “ _ What _ did you just say to me -”

“I’ve got a new gig in Las Vegas.  We’ve got to move.”

Vegas.  Vegas. No, no,  _ no _ , the last thing she needs is Vegas.  Vegas is crazy, and exciting, and overwhelming, and she just wants some peace and quiet and something  _ nice _ , you know, family friendly, something that doesn’t make her feel like a teenager in a horror film all over again.  It’s not the role she auditioned for, not the role she wants to play - she just wants to be herself,  _ ordinary _ , the girl who used to ride the train.

She should tell him how she feels.  She should tell him no.

But he doesn’t wait to see how she feels, and she doesn’t have the heart to argue with him anymore, so he just walks out, and she looks down as her stomach rumbles at the smell of the bacon.


End file.
